Ordered a new capture card

[Flying dutchman]

Goedemorgen Landrover,

don't tell me you're a Casema customer too, with their crooked frequencies! I had the same problem on the Marvel where I had to tweak the registry to get the desired frequencies in PC-VCR. It didn't work out for Avi_io, unfortunately, or else I wouldn't be in this thread.

One question I'm dying to know: What about the dark lord of Macrovision, can the Cinergy defeat him?

@DRP:
My mobo is an Asus CUSL2-C (i815 based) with a Celery 900 CPU and 512 mb PC-100 ram. Absolutely no probs in capturing full-frame Huffyuv or uncompressed YUY2 on the Marvel (apart from the channel selection problem). Bandwidth available is HUGE. Just about everything (including 2 x network cards and firewire) is on a single IRQ without any probs. Too bad Intel doesn't make Athlon motherboards, it would be a match made in heaven.

[DrP]

On the subject of replacing yea olde Marvel G400/200, has anyone found a card with TV out with the same abilities as the Matrox? I use my PC as a PVR and like the fact that Matrox is capable of outputting interlaced content, instead of a merging the two fields.

Any feedback is appreciated.

[Flying dutchman]

All Dual-head Millenniums and the Parhelia are capable of that, you don't need a Marvel for that. Or do you mean, a non-Matrox card?

[Frankie G]

Landrover: have you tried peeking and poking (now there is
a term that shows one's age!) in the registry to see if you
can add/delete/modify frequencies? I seem to remember the
Marvel having similar issues for .nl and .uk TV frequencies,
and there was a registry patch to correct these.

My Marvel G200 is still going, just recorded the Simpsons
last night, but I would really like something supported on
W2K and NTFS so I don't need segmented AVI's and dual boot.
Also when I capture from VHS, S-video or composite, the contrast
goes wacko, washing everything out in bright scenes.

[keithm]

Now that Svhs and Svhs-et video recorders have dropped to reasonable levels I always record a programme onto SVHS before computer capture. I have been trying a few capture cards that are supposed to do real time mpeg2 (a jetway pc-tv being one) and I found the quality of WIndvdr realtime capture to be very blocky. Unfortunately I could not get the new card to work with Picvideo or huffyuv so I could do a render to mpeg2 video. The obvious problem is getting around the 4gb file limit: if you capture in realtime mpeg2 then you won't hit the limit, but if the quality is too poor then you need to capture with a program that can segment the video-and if you can't access the card's driver and use huffyuv, picvideo or the like, the problems begin!

That's why I'm using an ATI Radeon all in wonder!

[Flying dutchman]

@ Landrover:

Just received the Cinergy; Looking good so far.
Recording real-time mpeg-2 with WinDVR works nicely.
Only WinDVR crashes consistently when I try to capture mpeg-1 (PAL VCD). Is that working on your PC?

[DrP]

yeah, i meant a non-matrox card.

I sent numerous emails to Matrox about the UHF frequencies being wrong in VT2.xx well before they were released. I gave em pointers to the right frequencies, hell, I even sent em a registry extract I made with the right frequencies... needless to say, VT 2.10a has the WRONG frequencies.

*sigh*

[landrover]

Fly on, Dutchman!

No, I haven't tried to record with the VCD template yet, I'll check it tonight. Didn't you have trouble installing WinDVR? I had to run the installer in Win98 compatibility mode to get it installed in XP.
No, I'm not with Casema. Even worse, I'm with UPC. But all Dutch cablecompanies use non standard frequencies, resulting in the usual problems that users have with all sorts of PC-TV cards.
And yes, just like with the Marvel, I've looked into the registry to see if I could make some changes there, but to no avail. Besides, it looks to me that XP's registry structure quite differs from Win98's. In the past I've tries to copy my PC-VCR tuner settings straight from Win98 into XP, but that didn't work either.

landrover

[keithm]

Att Flying dutchman. Let us know how you get on with low bitrate realtime recording (4000 kbs). This seems to be where realtime encoding is worse than software.....I await with interest!

[landrover]

...tried it and, yeah, WinDVR crashes after closing VCD capture session. Wasn´t too enthusiastic about the quality either. For normal digital VCR use I´ll stick to 1/2 res. MPEG-2.
Flying Dutchman: let me know if you find some frequency-related registry thingies.

landrover

-King off the road-

[keithm]

Ho bloody ho: this card ain't availavble in the U.K....

[Flying dutchman]

Landrover,

I haven't had time to do a really thorough test but this is what I've come up with so far. My system is Windows 2000 SP 3.


- The Terratec TV software captures AVI while recording sound directly through the TV board which makes audio perfectly in sync with video. AVI capturing in the Terratec TV software works perfectly. I still have to test what happens at the 2-gb boundary. If it doesn't do openDML or automatically creates new files it could prove to be perfectly useless. Image quality is fine thanks to the 9-bit Philips A/D converter and the Philips tuner module. The board supports a busload of frame formats (YUY2, RGB32, RGB24, RGB555, RGB565,YVU9, I420, YV12, UYVY, Y41P) and resolutions (PAL: 160x120, 240x180, 320x240, 640x240, 640x480, 480x576, 704x576, 720x576, 352x288, 704x288, 720x288 plus their NTSC counterparts with 480 and 240 lines height.). It also supports all video and audio codecs on the system, I tested it with Picvideo.


-WinDVR records its audio through the sound card so it has to be connected to the TV card's audio output. So far no problems.

- Mpeg-2 realtime capturing works great in WinDVR; I did a real-time PAL SVCD capture (480x576) and it did so without dropping frames on my Celeron 900! Quality is roughly VHS (better than VCD, yet worse than tMpeg-SVCD). Amazing that it can do that in real-time!

-Mpeg-1 capturing in WinDVR crashes immediately without actually recording. You say it actually captured some on Windows XP? I have to test that; I'd like to record cartoon movies directly to VCD for my kids. The playing time of SVCD is too short.

- AVI capturing through the VFW/WDM wrapper in Avi_io simply doesn't work. This could be a Windows 2000 issue, though. I still have to test it under other operating systems.

[landrover]

Goeiemorgen Dutchman,

I think we can provide potential Cinergy users with lots of handy info here on MURC. This forum has evolved far beyond the Matrox boundaries, ´though I think it´s cool that former Matrox users stay on the forum because we have common roots or something.

Like I stated in an earlier post in this thread, this card really defeats it´s counterparts because it can handle audio input, giving perfect A/V sync. For some strange reasons AVI captures can suddenly stop (on my system) which is a pain if you recorded a TV-programme. I cannot use every available codec on my system, but that´s confirmed by TerraTec. Besides I really don´t use other codecs than Huff´s and DivX5.02, which both work OK. By the way, I use the newer beta driver and software, instead of the boxed version.

This WinDVR thingy is a strange app for itself. My version didn´t install directly in XP and had to be installed in compatibility mode. My version does capture PAL VCD, but crashes when I stop the capture and give the file a name. The output MPEG file is technically fine though, from start to finish. I just think it´s too blocky, even for the kids´cartoons.
MPEG-2 capture works fine, with the exception that I can´t capture full res without dropping frames. Haven´t tried SVCD res yet. I capture daily using the "beter" preset, which is 1/2 res MPEG-2 and just like you, I´m impressed with the result. The audio too: although you have to use a separate audio card here, the results are in fine sync.
I´m just really unhappy with the WinDVR tuner menue and wish that future versions will give more manual control over the settings.
I´ll keep in touch,

landrover

[keithm]

If this card capture PAL I wonder why it's not available in the U.K? How much was it? What standard does it capture, maye be it's nit PAL I.

It is great that the video capture community stays together, shame we can't get a Matrox product to do the job though

[landrover]

You're right about the Matrox issue, I sure hope we can stay together, though.
The Cinergy cards go for about 75 Euros for the 400 (which lacks the RDS radio tuner) to around 100 Euros for the 600. I know both cards aren't for sale in the UK, dunno why. I'll check if it supports PAL-I.

landrover